Upcoming Events:

September 201330

The Titus-Hepp Lecture Series welcomes John Haldane, University of St. Andrews, presenting "Naturalism, Realism, and Natural Realism'

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Full Description: The Titus-Hepp Lecture Series welcomes John Haldane, University of St. Andrews, presenting "Naturalism, Realism, and Natural Realism." Haldane will discuss Rrealism and naturalism, and their connections with both historical and contemporary philosophy sources: Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Reid, and John McDowell, among others. Haldane has published several items on both Reid and McDowell, and Hume and Aristotle. Free and open to the public.

November 201308

The Spectrum Series welcomes Ronald Sandler presenting "A Defense of the Moral Status of Artifacts?”

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Full Description: Ronald Sandler presents "A Defense of the Moral Status of Artifacts?” It is a common view in applied ethics that artifacts – things created by us for our ends (e.g. computers, cars, water bottles, and pencils) – do not have direct moral status. They do not have interests that need to be consider when our actions or policies impact them, so we can treat them however we like. In this talk Sandler will discuss whether this view is reasonable and explore the possibility that we might have responsibilities to the artifacts that we create. Ronald Sandler is an associate professor of Philosophy and the Director of the Ethics Institute at Northeastern University—and a Denison alum. Winner of Northeastern's Excellence in Teaching Award, he is a leading figure in the "environmental virtue ethics" movement. He is the author of Character and Environment (Columbia) and the forthcoming Ethics and Species (Cambridge), and has published widely on issues in environmental ethics, environmental justice, and the philosophy of technology with special emphasis on nanotechnology. Free and open to the public.

February 201403

Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Ben Caplan presenting "Brutal Propositions." A view of propositions is brutal if it appeals to primitive entities, or brute facts, or both. In this paper, we set out our preferred brutal view, one that is consistent with the claim that propositions have parts. Caplan is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Ohio State University. He earned his doctorate at UCLA and taught at the University of Manitoba before coming to Ohio. He works mainly in metaphysics. Free and open to the public.

Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Ben Caplan presenting "Brutal Propositions." A view of propositions is brutal if it appeals to primitive entities, or brute facts, or both. In this paper, we set out our preferred brutal view, one that is consistent with the claim that propositions have parts. Caplan is a professor in the Philosophy Department at Ohio State University. He earned his doctorate at UCLA and taught at the University of Manitoba before coming to Ohio. He works mainly in metaphysics. Free and open to the public.

February 201414

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Linda Martin Alcoff presenting "The Future of Whiteness."

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Linda Martin Alcoff presenting "The Future of Whiteness." Is racism constitutive of white identity? If we imagine this to be the case, does it eclipse the scope of future transformations of white identity, making them literally unimaginable? What are the future possibilities for white identity? This is not just an effort at prediction, as if whiteness is some natural phenomena we can only observe from a distance. Whiteness is an identity born of both history and current practices, so the question of the future is a question about what we should do now, a question constrained in turn by what we can do now. Free and open to the public.

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Linda Martin Alcoff presenting "The Future of Whiteness."

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Linda Martin Alcoff presenting "The Future of Whiteness." Is racism constitutive of white identity? If we imagine this to be the case, does it eclipse the scope of future transformations of white identity, making them literally unimaginable? What are the future possibilities for white identity? This is not just an effort at prediction, as if whiteness is some natural phenomena we can only observe from a distance. Whiteness is an identity born of both history and current practices, so the question of the future is a question about what we should do now, a question constrained in turn by what we can do now. Free and open to the public.

March 201406

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Allen Carlson presenting "What is a Sound Natural Aesthetics for Conservation Policy and Land Management?"

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Allen Carlson, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, presenting "What is a Sound Natural Aesthetics for Conservation Policy and Land Management?" Recently a number of environmental philosophers, realizing the importance of aesthetic appreciation in our relationship with the natural environment, have claimed that, as one prominent environmental philosopher puts it: "a sound natural aesthetics is crucial to sound conservation policy and land management." In light of such claims, the question of the nature of "a sound natural aesthetics" warrants consideration. The question has been addressed by several different accounts, ranging from time-honored approaches such as the picturesque tradition and landscape formalism to more recent points of view. This presentation will examine these different positions, arguing that, concerning the question "What is a sound natural aesthetics for conservation policy and land management?" some approaches are more promising than others. Free and open to the public.

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Allen Carlson presenting "What is a Sound Natural Aesthetics for Conservation Policy and Land Management?"

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Allen Carlson, professor emeritus at the University of Alberta, presenting "What is a Sound Natural Aesthetics for Conservation Policy and Land Management?" Recently a number of environmental philosophers, realizing the importance of aesthetic appreciation in our relationship with the natural environment, have claimed that, as one prominent environmental philosopher puts it: "a sound natural aesthetics is crucial to sound conservation policy and land management." In light of such claims, the question of the nature of "a sound natural aesthetics" warrants consideration. The question has been addressed by several different accounts, ranging from time-honored approaches such as the picturesque tradition and landscape formalism to more recent points of view. This presentation will examine these different positions, arguing that, concerning the question "What is a sound natural aesthetics for conservation policy and land management?" some approaches are more promising than others. Free and open to the public.

March 201427

Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Amy Kind presenting "Imagining Under Constraints." As Hume has famously claimed, we are nowhere more free than in our imagination. While this feature of the imagination suggests that the imagination has a crucial role to play in modal epistemology, it also suggests that imagining cannot provide us with any non-modal knowledge about the world in which we live. In this talk, Kind rejects this latter suggestion. Offering an account of imagining that I call "imagining under constraints,” she provides a framework for showing when and how an imaginative project can play a justificatory role with respect to our beliefs about the world. That we can be free in our imaginings does not show that they must proceed unfettered; as she argues, our ability to constrain our imaginings in light of facts about the world enables us to learn from them. The important upshot is that the imagination has considerably more epistemic significance than previously thought. Free and open to the public.

Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Amy Kind presenting "Imagining Under Constraints." As Hume has famously claimed, we are nowhere more free than in our imagination. While this feature of the imagination suggests that the imagination has a crucial role to play in modal epistemology, it also suggests that imagining cannot provide us with any non-modal knowledge about the world in which we live. In this talk, Kind rejects this latter suggestion. Offering an account of imagining that I call "imagining under constraints,” she provides a framework for showing when and how an imaginative project can play a justificatory role with respect to our beliefs about the world. That we can be free in our imaginings does not show that they must proceed unfettered; as she argues, our ability to constrain our imaginings in light of facts about the world enables us to learn from them. The important upshot is that the imagination has considerably more epistemic significance than previously thought. Free and open to the public.

October 201413

Full Description: The Titus Hepp Series welcomes Rachel Cohon presenting "Promises: Hume, Scanlon, and Voluntary Self-Obligation." Underlying their well-known disagreement about whether we need a social practice in order to make (binding) promises, David Hume and T. M. Scanlon have a deeper disagreement about promises. Surprisingly, Hume regards a voluntary act of self-obligation as essential to promising, while Scanlon does not; and (also surprisingly) Hume does not regard assuring the other person of what you will do as essential to promising, while of course Scanlon does. There are interesting reasons why Hume may have held these positions, and why they might be closer to the truth than Scanlon's. Professor Cohon received her PhD from U.C.L.A. Her fields of interest are ethics, the philosophy of action, and the history of ethics. She teaches graduate courses in moral theory, including such topics as consequentialism vs. deontology vs. virtue ethics, moral realism, the normativity of ethics, and eighteenth century moral philosophy.

November 201403

The Department of Philosophy welcomes David Wood presenting "Disconcerting Experience."

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes David Wood presenting "Disconcerting Experience." Why is experience important to philosophy? It can provide evidence for our beliefs. It can help keep us open to the world. But everything hangs on what counts as experience. Those that shake our fondest assumptions deserve special attention. David Wood is the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Wood's interests lie in the possibilities of reading and thinking opened up by contemporary continental philosophy and by nineteenth century German thought.

December 201405

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Christopher Pincock presenting "Newton, Laplace and Salmon on Explaining the Tides" for the Titus-Hepp Lecture Series.

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Christopher Pincock presenting "Newton, Laplace and Salmon on Explaining the Tides" for the Titus-Hepp Lecture Series. Pincock states: "Salmon cites Newton's explanation of the tides in support of a causal account of scientific explanation. In this paper I reconsider the details of how Newton and his successors actually succeeded in explaining several key features of the tides. It turns out that these explanations depend on elements that are not easily interpreted in causal terms. I use the explanations offered after Newton to indicate two different ways that non-causal factors can be significant for scientific explanation. In Newton's equilibrium explanation, only a few special features of the tides can be explained. A later explanation deploys a kind of harmonic analysis to provide an informative classification of the tides at different locations. I consider the options for making sense of these explanations." Christopher Pincock is an Associate Professor in the Philosophy Department at the Ohio State University. His research is centered on the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of science and the history of analytic philosophy.

March 201527

The Department of Philosophy welcomes Sam Wheeler presenting a Titus Hepp Lecture, "Pluralist Essentialism: How Davidson, Aristotle and Kripke Are All Partly Right."

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Full Description: The Department of Philosophy welcomes Sam Wheeler presenting a Titus Hepp Lecture, "Pluralist Essentialism: How Davidson, Aristotle and Kripke Are All Partly Right." Donald Davidson’s externalism and principle of charity imply that he should have been a kind of essentialist, agreeing with Aristotle, Kripke and others that there are de remodal truths about entities. Given that, as Davidson said, “sameness is always relative to a predicate,” entities should be regarded as articulations of what is, albeit articulations that are not given, but imposed in order to allow us to make inferences that depend on sub-sentential structure. Just as space does not come divided into feet as opposed to meters, so the world does not come divided into just one set of kinds of object. Dr. Sam Wheeler III is professor of Philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He writes in philosophy of language, metaphysics, ethics, deconstruction, and ancient philosophy. He published “Neo-Davidsonian Metaphysics” in 2013 and is currently working on a book on modality.